The Sacramento Chinese Quarter

By eighteen fifty-two, Sacramento had a Chinatown. It had formed within months of the first wave of Chinese miners arriving in eighteen forty-nine, and by the early eighteen-fifties it was centered on the I Street and J Street corridor, one of the largest Chinese communities in Gold Rush California. It had groceries, gambling houses, temples, and a labor contractor network that supplied workers to mines throughout the Mother Lode. It was, by any reasonable measure, a thriving urban community built by people who had come six thousand miles and were making a life.

What happened to it is not a single event. It is a pattern that repeated itself, and then repeated itself again.

The first iteration was arson and expulsion by city ordinance. The Sacramento Chinese community was repeatedly targeted by arsonists in the eighteen-fifties and eighteen-sixties, driven from neighborhoods by ordinances that had no other purpose, and forced to relocate within the city. The Foreign Miners' Tax of eighteen fifty-two had driven Chinese men off productive mining claims in the mountains; city ordinances in Sacramento drove their families off productive commercial ground closer to home.

The second iteration was urban renewal. In the nineteen-thirties and again in the nineteen-fifties, city governments across California used the language of slum clearance and urban improvement to demolish the districts where Chinese and Japanese communities had rebuilt themselves after earlier expulsions. Sacramento's Chinatown was demolished. The Japantown that had formed nearby was demolished in the postwar redevelopment wave.

You are standing near the site of one of the most substantial Chinese communities in Gold Rush California. There is no plaque at the correct address. There is no marker where the temple stood. The people who built a significant part of the early economy of this city are represented in Old Sacramento's interpretive signage almost not at all.